Anyway, I guess I've also been thinking a lot about how much time we all waste in the blogosphere... I mean, do we really need to discuss the latest wingnut quackery ...

Wingnuts like Coulter and Limbaugh and Jonah Goldberg sit around and whip off stream-of-consciousness rants as fast as they can, then paste 'em up at NRO, The Weekly Standard, and similarly disreputable places, knowing that people like Ezra Klein and David Neiwert and Bilmon will then spend hours of their time on detailed analyses of mindless rants that couldn't have taken more than five minutes to write. Thus lots of smart people waste their time--time that could have been spent actively working to, for example, get the current band of lunatics and criminals out of the White House--refuting nonsense. As one of my colleagues pointed out to me, in academia we often spend more time refuting the nonsense cranked out by famous morons than the famous morons spent writing the nonsense in the first place. The wingnuts, I hypothesize, have come to realize that if they throw a really stupid argument our way, instead of ignoring it we'll drop what we're doing and waste our time formulating arguments against it. Thus their five minutes of work sucks hours of work out of some smart liberal who might otherwise have spent his time effectively.